I have been writing the following blog post for years. “Manchester City Council promised to do x by [date]. They refused to say if they had or not, so I submitted a FoIA. They haven’t done x. Isn’t that awful.”
I have about a dozen FOIAs I haven’t even bothered to open and then turn into blog posts and letters to the MEN. Because nobody gives a shit. (Footnote). Probably rightly, I don’t know any more. Friends of the Earth disappeared up the Council’s backside almost a decade ago, and loves it, warm and dark in there. Manchester Green Party is complaining about potholes and litter in Moss Side, and not it seems doing much of anything else (‘target to win’, donchaknow). The anarchists of Manchester Climate Action gave up when their leader left (no, that isn’t a typo). And as for the rest of them… well…

So, that combined with reading a newspaper and seeing emissions surging, concentrations matching them, and the scientists performing percussive maintenance on their climate models and finding that these models have low-balled the speed and scale of the coming impacts, well, a man could get a little despairing. And he could write something like this on the Book of Faces

Facebook, please supply reasons I am wrong – “give it a few million years, and, unless we push the planet into a Venus-like condition, all this will be forgotten, and other life forms will have evolved. We will be a very thin nasty layer in the fossil record. I used to think that was very cold comfort, but it’s the only comfort I’ve got left. This species has been a grotesque evolutionary dead-end.”

This was a good thing to do, because there were many wise (and some of course not so wise) comments. And the point of this whole saggy post is this – y’all should go read this, by my anarcha friend fleabite.

i wrote this quickly as a comment to a post re climate change. i’ve been thinking about this for a few months, and have had a few chats with people about it, but i’m still working things through. it seems almost blasphemous amongst activist circles, and probably mainstream, to talk about grief re climate change. like that is just accepting the status quo rather than acting to avert it.

but i don’t think we have a choice. i think we need to let ourselves grieve, support each other in doing that, and recognise that we do have a major loss – the loss of the future we thought we had.

that is important to do because we are all human, all precious and special and deserving of care.

additionally, we need to be functional for the months and years and decades ahead. not still attached to our non-existant shiney future, like someone never moving on from a relationship breakup or bereavement. we need to accept that loss, and carry it with us as we take care of ourselves, our communities, all humanity, all life on this planet. we are at the beginning of a roller coaster ride and it is frightening and will require….

* Actually, I suspect a lot of people give a shit. But the work (and it is work) of sustaining morale and focus for the long slog is beyond me. And I’d rather not waste the time on that in the last few ‘good’ (everything is relative) years that we have left. So, toss a little completely contemptible self-loathing on the pyre while you’re at it.

1 Goal for 2017

Do enough to look myself in the eye (through shades), but not so much as I interfere with Writing My Bloody Thesis.
2016 goals were not met, and nobody cares -
1) At least 12 posts on "preparedness - movement-building for coping with the coming horrors"
2) At least 9 posts on the laughable ritual of "scrutiny" that Manchester City Council stumbles through.
3) At least 12 "looting the ivory tower" posts, where useful insights that academics have had get translated into English.
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